Covid-19: Trade Union Calls for Dialogue Over threat on Businesses in Ghana

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) wants various stakeholders to hold discussions on how to minimize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses in Ghana.

TUC believes this will help in identifying a friendly environment for businesses in the country to thrive, in order to remedy the massive job losses amidst the outbreak.

The Union had earlier lamented on consequences of the lockdown on local businesses, insisting that a continued restrictions on movement will cause many more persons to lose their jobs.

The Director of Research and Policy at the TUC, Dr. Kwabena Nyarko Otoo, in an interview on Accra based Citi TV urged major stakeholders to come together and find ways of tackling current issues bedevilling businesses in the country.

“The stimulus as we have now is a good start. But if you look at all the sectors that have been affected now and workers that are looking up to the government, you clearly see that we need to do more as a country in order to be able to contain the situation that we have at hand. This is only the first generation of the effect that we are seeing. Assuming that all the companies that have asked their workers to work from home become successful in ensuring that they use ICT to do the work, some of those workers will not come back to the workplace. It is a very difficult situation for employers and also for workers.”

“These are medium to long term effects we need to consider. The scale of the problem is such that, you need to try as much as possible to match the intervention with the expected loss. So we need to dialogue more -employers, workers, and the government need to use the social dialogue mechanism to actually come to the size and magnitude of the problem we are facing and define the kind of interventions required to address those things.” he noted.

As the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to widen globally and in Ghana, some companies in the country have shut down their operations due to low patronage.

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Some have already laid-off casual workers and are preparing to cut down on permanent staff.

According to them, it was no longer prudent to continue operations when the numbers have dropped drastically; while they still pay salaries, bills and taxes.

Also, the announcement of the partial restriction saw many businesses in the formal sector close down some of their branches and reducing their operation hours.

The financial implications led to some staff losing their jobs with others forced to take salary cuts.

With the announcement of the ease of the restrictions, some formal businesses have started opening closed branches.